I understand the "everybody does it that way" aspect of the cloud, but the old way of subscribing to a dynamic DNS and hosting locally still works just fine and you have full control of things.
Later, once you have more traffic and/or paying customers, it would be worth looking into cloud hosting. And even then, you probably don't need as much horsepower as they're trying to sell.
A friend of mine is getting ready to retire after 30-odd years in IT. He has already tooled up and trained for his retirement profession: farrier; the guy who makes and installs horse shoes. It's more profitable than it used to be since few people do it any more, and farriers typically work on their own schedule.
The pool of tech jobs in my area was sparse, but the local employers were fully on board with the big-city "use them for a while and toss them out" system. So when times were good in IT, I bought a machine shop, and in between times of lucrative IT employment, I did short-run metalworking and engine rebuilding.
I'm mostly retired now, and my paying work involves maintenance on proprietary inventory and billing software written in a 1960s language in a dialect that became unsupported in the mid-1980s. And it runs in MS-DOS.
I've mostly set aside the languages and tools I used to use, and I'm learning Haiku's variant of C++ to write some native-mode Haiku application software.
My development is on Linux. Some of my work has to run on Windows as well; VirtualBox has several Windows VMs, a ReactOS VM, and Wine for testing.
I've never had to deal with the BSDs or Macs. If a customer was willing to pay for me to come up to speed on either of them I would consider it, but I have no interest otherwise.
I am slowly coming up to speed on Haiku, and now that most of my application and development software runs on Haiku and its hardware compatibility is much better, I'm looking to eventually move from Linux to Haiku for my primary workstation.
I finally got (very expensive) hearing aids, and made several trips back to the audiologist to have them tuned. Then I wound up not wearing them, because most people think they're speaking English, but it's some kind of mumbly slobbergobble with incorrect, missing, or mispronounced words. The aids just turned "mufuh dogga baytaaa" into "MUFUH DOGGA BAYTAAA."
Yeah, I heard that just fine without electronic assistance.
Paying attention to how often people with "normal" hearing said "what?" to each other was a revelation. Yes, I have a problem. But it's a small problem; the big problem is that a large number of people may as well be trying to communicate by interpretive farting and tap-dancing, because "the words what are coming out of their mouth" are mostly gibberish.
If it was local - implanted, or on my body, it might be a useful tool with the correct training.
If it was networked, it would need to have much tighter security than the current internet.
If it was just a terminal to some corporate server running unknown software for purposes I wouldn't necessarily agree to, nope, nope, nopity-nope. Even if it didn't start off as a device for pushing propaganda and advertising, there's no realistic expectation that it wouldn't evolve into that over time.
Sounds like Jeff Duntmann's "jiminy", which he wrote about in PC Techniques magazine back in 1992. A matchbox-sized general purpose computer and life log, infrared connections to peripherals as needed, with a mesh network to other jiminies and the internet-at-large. Jeff didn't use the term "AI", but that would describe how it worked.
> A matchbox-sized general purpose computer and life log, infrared connections to peripherals as needed, with a mesh network to other jiminies and the internet-at-large. Jeff didn't use the term "AI", but that would.
Notwithstanding that most of the mobile OS’s are locked down more than some would prefer for a “general purpose computer” (but less than is likely for a porta-Grok), and that most devices are bigger than a matchbook to support UI that wouldn't be available in that form factor (though devices are available in matchbook size with more limited UI), and that it mostly uses RF like Bluetooth instead of IR for peripherals because IR works poorly in most circumstances, isn’t that what a smartphone is?
Really interesting link to "Jiminy", I hadn’t heard of that before. Also didn’t know Musk was planning something similar, but I think it’s more of a phone than a wearable?
Windows Phone's UI is still with us, from Windows 8 onwards. Everything on 8, 10, and 11 is optimized for a touch interface on a small screen, which is ridiculous on a modern desktop with a 32" or so monitor and a trackball or mouse.
False. The Metro design was abandoned long ago. No live tiles, no typography-first minimal UIs in windows 10/11. I pin an email app to taskbar/start, I don't see the unread count.
From Windows 10, there is a switch between desktop and touch mode.
They stopped supporting small tablets some years ago though, and made it worse with every Windows update. I can only surmise that it was to make people stop using them. Slow GUI, low contrast, killed apps.
Later, once you have more traffic and/or paying customers, it would be worth looking into cloud hosting. And even then, you probably don't need as much horsepower as they're trying to sell.
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